The Australian government on Tuesday announced plans to phase out incandescent light bulbs and replace them with more energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs across the country.

Prime Minister John Howard said the plan would help all Australians play a part in cutting harmful gas emissions: "Here's something practical that everybody will participate in."

Ok, I'm glad to see people adopting CF, but this article doesn't once mention mercury. All CF's have mercury, and depending on where you live, it can be a crime to throw one away in the trash. You must have a comprehensive recycling system for CF to make this doable and I am very concerned that there is no mention of one.

In the US, environmental organizations are focusing on making CFs more like car batteries: Every place that sells one will take them and recycle them, and the recycling cost is built into the price of the bulb.

Cuba's Fidel Castro launched a similar program two years ago, sending youth brigades into homes and switching out regular bulbs for energy-saving ones to help battle electrical blackouts around the island.

For some reason, this invokes a mental image of an army of children, wearing arm bands, doing their part for the fatherland! And for some reason, that makes me laugh.

Australia to ban old-style light bulbs

Testimony from Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor, 1977-1981. Original is a PDF. Also available via Google in HTML.

I've quoted four contiguous paragraphs below. Interesting words from one of the architects of the Mujahideen resistance forces in Soviet occupied Afghanistan. When he says that "most Muslims are not embracing Islamic fundamentalism," he's probably in a position to know something about the subject.

* * *

If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMD's in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the "decisive ideological struggle" of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America’s involvement in World War II.

This simplistic and demagogic narrative overlooks the fact that Nazism was based on the military power of the industrially most advanced European state; and that Stalinism was able to mobilize not only the resources of the victorious and militarily powerful Soviet Union but also had worldwide appeal through its Marxist doctrine. In contrast, most Muslims are not embracing Islamic fundamentalism; al Qaeda is an isolated fundamentalist Islamist aberration; most Iraqis are engaged in strife because the American occupation of Iraq destroyed the Iraqi state; while Iran, though gaining in regional influence, is itself politically divided, economically and militarily weak. To argue that America is already at war in the region with a wider Islamic threat, of which Iran is the epicenter, is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Deplorably, the Administration's foreign policy in the Middle East region has lately relied almost entirely on such sloganeering. Vague and inflammatory talk about "a new strategic context" which is based on "clarity" and which prompts "the birth pangs of a new Middle East" is breeding intensifying anti-Americanism and is increasing the danger of a long-term collision between the United States and the Islamic world. Those in charge of U.S. diplomacy have also adopted a posture of moralistic self-ostracism toward Iran strongly reminiscent of John Foster Dulles's attitude of the early 1950's toward Chinese Communist leaders (resulting among other things in the well-known episode of the refused handshake). It took some two decades and a half before another Republican president was finally able to undo that legacy.

Zbigniew Brzezinski's Senate Foreign Relations Committee Testimony, 2/1/2007

Declan reports that Senators McCain and Schumer have proposed the SAFE act, which would create a national database of child porn images - or I'm guessing, simply require that the FBI make their own database public. ISPs would be given access to this database, and would be required to screen traffic and alert the authorities of any user who transmits/hosts an image that matches a fingerprint in this database.

Once the infrastructure is in place for them to compare hashes of child porn, it won't be too difficult for them to start comparing hashes of music, copies of dissident literature, photographs of dead soldiers in Iraq, anti-Scientology documentation, or anything else that someone with their hand in a Senator's pocket doesn't like.

To combat against this evil intrusion into our private Internet behavior, I now introduce 'broken glass'. It is a perl script that when given an image file, will change 1 pixel's red component by /- 1. It's not enough for the human eye to see, but it will make the MD5/SHA1 hash fingerprint of the image be completely different.

This is an interesting idea. The counter attack to this would be break a file into many small pieces and hash each one. Then, for every image that comes across the wire, break it into pieces, hash them, and if a certain threshold of them match, its child porn.

Of course the counter-counter attack would be to randomly select some ratio of pixel locations based on the resolution of the image and toggle the red component on them.

I'm not trying to enable child porn. Those people should all be shot. However, its interesting to think about how data can be modified to survive a hostile network that is looking for certain traffic, and yet still be readable on the other side.

You can randomly toggle image pixels, what about plain text? Well, Spam has shown that the human brain can "correct" misspellings, repeated letters, or words in 1337 speak while reading. And then you have whitespace...

RE: Thought Crime

Some hackers at Outerz0ne this weekend setup a home-built photo booth.

Hacker's Photobooth!

A man who was fired by IBM for visiting an adult chat room at work is suing the company for $5 million, claiming he is an Internet addict who deserves treatment and sympathy rather than dismissal.

James Pacenza, 58, of Montgomery, says he visits chat rooms to treat traumatic stress incurred in 1969 when he saw his best friend killed during an Army patrol in Vietnam.

In papers filed in federal court in White Plains, Pacenza said the stress caused him to become "a sex addict, and with the development of the Internet, an Internet addict." He claimed protection under the American with Disabilities Act.

... Wait a second here. Because he saw his buddies get killed over 28 years ago he needs to get some some dirty talking during the work day?

Ok, seriously, this is the bullshit.

Man sues IBM over firing, says he's an Internet addict

Tsudohnimh wrote:
I clicked a link for hot judicial action and I got 0wn3d. I'd like to thank the academy, my parents for warping me, Tom and Nick for letting me do this, and my hero Acidus.

OK, let me explain what the story is with this. Its possible to embed a link in a MemeStreams page to /recommend. When people who are logged in click on it, it will automatically post a message to their MemeStream, and then redirect them back to the page they were looking at. Ironically, this tends to result in lots of clicking, as it seems like the browser has done something wrong. If Acidus had really wanted to be nasty he could have included a redundant link in the posts he was adding to your pages to that people who read your MemeStreams would also spread the post. Its like a meme worm.

This is actually a problem that Rattle and I anticipated when we first built this website. We used to have protection in place that prevented this. It worked by checking to make sure that when you submitted a post the referer header in your http request came from /recommend and not some other page. Unfortunately, we ran into trouble with this feature. Some Internet privacy software screens referer headers out of http requests, and so people who used such software were unable to post. After struggling through the process of explaining to a few users how to fix this problem we decided to disable the security feature for /recommend until we had time to revisit the problem. The security feature is still present in /delete and /edit, because we decided that a self propagating MemeStreams Meme was only a bit of an annoyance, but if someone wrote a javascript that wiped out your whole blog that would be a serious problem. This explains why a few of you have trouble editing or deleting posts sometimes.

We have a fix for this problem which is unlikely to cause problems for people running Internet privacy software. Its checked into subversion. However, we haven't shipped it yet because it is boiled in with a bunch of other changes to the UI that aren't quite ready for release yet. We decided it might be fun to go ahead and let Acidus propagate one of these Memes as he uncovered this issue a few weeks back and advised us on how to implement a better fix. I'd like to say that we're shipping this weekend, but I don't think its going to happen. I'm skiing and Rattle is attending Outerz0ne. Acidus is actually giving a talk at Outerz0ne which includes a discussion of this issue, so its not out of the question that you might see a few more people screwing around with it. Fortunately I don't think you can do anything terribly malicious with this. Its all in good fun.

Hopefully we'll have our update out soon.

RE: I like it old-school! - An Explanation

Well, its over. Memestreams now has a cron job running every 2 minutes which deletes the "I like it old-school!" posts that got posted to a user's blog without their permission when they clicked on a link. Welcome to the wonderful world of the XSRF attack.

Originally, the hyperlink that caused a user to make the post was in the SRC of an image. This means simply looking at an HTML page with the image would make a user create a new post. Every time they looked at the page. Once this image attack reached the front page. everyone would be owned, and every time they refreshed the page, they would get owned again. I almost took down my Memestreams dev box with the flood of hits against the database.

Anyway, thanks to Tom and Nick for letting me do this. I found the vuln a few weeks back, and when we roll out the site update in a few days, it will be fixed.

The technology executives and analysts here in Barcelona this week are trying to figure out how take all the content found on the Web and migrate it to your mobile device.

The mobile phone network operators like to charge for content. One executive, who didn't want to be quoted, told CNN this creates a "closed garden" of content that is controlled by your mobile operator and is dependent on what deals the operator has with a select group of content providers.

I'm pretty sure this will fail. That was the lesson of AOL. Remember all those ads that said "Go to AOL keyword [blah]?" AOL tried to be both an ISP and a rich content provider. Their product was access to a wide range of content, presumably styled and vetted by AOL for "safeness" and accuracy, all in a single easy to access place. This wasn't a bad deal in the mid 90s, when free websites with quality content supported by advertising didn't really exist in large numbers. And even the few sites that did exist were difficult to find because search engines sucked so much. I distinctly remember having to explain to people in 1996 that AOL was not the Internet.

So what happened? Things matured. Why spend $20 a month and go to AOL keyword "WebMD" when I can spend $10 a month and go to www.webmd.com. Why visit AOL's software library when I have download.com? Even if everyone at AOL was in the business of generating content for AOL, there was still an several orders of magnitude more people generating content for the web. Suddenly there were hundreds of gates into the theme park that was the Internet, and nobody wanted to wait in line at the most expensive gate.

What about mobile phone providers? They are just gates onto a data network. They are trying to provide content their users want, and charge for it. However, they can never provide all the types of content their users want. This is a classic Long Tail issue. You are targeting mobile content at kids. But why? What about the millions of housewives? Coupons, sales, what about recipes? Take a picture of a barcode, and a website tells you meal ideas involving that item. There is definitely something there.

This "mobile ISPs providing content" plan will fail as soon as one mobile provider decides to focus on leveraging the content of the entire Internet. If companyA provides the fastest possible access to existing content, put money in caching proxies and into software gateways that automatically reformat HTML to fit a mobile screen they would win. Mobile providers need to embrace their role as "provider of the tubes" and make their money on charging for packets, not trying to decide what I want those packets to contain.

Social networking goes mobile

Hot Supreme Court Justice on Supreme Court Justice action!

HAHAHAH! That is awesome. Safe for all ages, and a really funny trick!

Judicial action (revisited)

Too funny!

Hot Supreme Court Justice on Supreme Court Justice action!

Why is it that every time my cat Butterscotch walks on my laptop, he manages to step on the power button and shutdown Windows?